Preface to the Chinese Edition of The Choice for Europe
Appropriately, I write these words in China. Though my window,I look out over the cityscape of Shanghai, transformed as a result of China’s recent “economic miracle”. The most important causes of this transformation have been the decisions of the Chinese people to undertake domestic economic and political reforms. But Chinawas also lucky to embark on its new course in an international system that has permitted, indeed even encouraged, its “peaceful development.” This has been true largely because of the existence of voluntary international norms and institutions—the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and many others—that facilitate interstate cooperation to promote peace and prosperity.The existence of these institutions is no coincidence, but part of a trend of world-historical significance. International organization is in fact the only distinctively new political form to emerge and prosper since the rise of the social-democratic welfare state in the late 19th century. Global governance is now well-established—a widespread fact of life we all take for granted. And among international institutions, the European Union (EU) is the most ambitious and the most successful.[1]
At the core of the EU is its single customs union for goods, services and agricultural products, flanked by substantial common regulatory authority. Despite negative publicity connected with a decade of squabbling over Europe’s controversial “constitutional treaty” (now perhaps finally set for ratification),the EU’slast decade has arguably been its most successful. It saw the introduction of the single currency (the Euro), enlargement to 27 members, extension of the border-free Schengen zone, creation of stronger institutions for foreign and defense policy coordination, and greater democratic control over EU functions.Europe’s regional institutions—a directly elected parliament, supreme constitutional court, council that decided by majority vote, and technocratic commission—are by far the most highly developed among multilateral institutions, in superficial ways resembling a national government as much as an international organization.
Some argue that the EU is an internal giant in economic matters but a feeble foreign policy actor. They predict that the US, China, and Indiawill be the superpowers of the 21st century, while Europe will be left behind. This view is particularly commonplace in countries like China, still largely concerned as it is with issues in its immediate region, such as status of Taiwan and relations with Japan, where “hard power” seems to loom large. But in fact this a misperception, one based on an anachronistic reading of realist world politics based on 19th century Bismarckian calculations of potential military force. A more modern (or post-modern) analysis reveals that the EU is not only a potential 21st century superpower; it is in fact already the world’s only other global superpower, besides the US. It is the world’s “quiet superpower”, which utilizes common purpose and high per capita GDP to deploy unique instruments of civilian power unavailable to the US, China or any other great power.
What are these instruments? First, the EU possesses the most cost-effective single form of power projection in the world today, which is the promise of EU membership. Since the end of the Cold War, the promise of EU membership—the EU’s so-called “power of attraction”—has played a decisive role in extending peace, prosperity and democracy to over a dozen countries in its periphery, including 12 new members, potential members in the former Yugoslavia, Turkey and the Ukraine. One need only compare Europe’s success to American efforts at democratization in Iraq to see the advantages.Second, the EU conducts a common trade policy and, along with the US, dominates the World Trade Organization, as well as bilateral trade relations with many countries. It is the largest trading partner of every country in its vicinity, including every nation of the Middle East, and trades more with China than the US. Germany alone has a larger trade surplus than China. Third, the EU and European countries dispense 70% of the world’s foreign aid. Fourth, coordinated European diplomacy—even though it is conducted on a “coalition of the willing” basis—has been effective at promoting reform in countries like Morocco, defusing crises in countries like Montenegro, and reversing the policies of countries like Libya. Fourth, Europe is the major supporter of multilateral organization and international law in the world today. 90% of European positions in multilateral organizations are coordinated. Fifth, Europe funds most of the world’s peacekeepers, and deploys nearly 100,000 of its own troops in third countries, increasingly in joint (but flexible) EU and multinational missions.In countries like the Congo, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo, these are European-led. Sixth, the “European model” of governance—its distinctive balance between market economics, social welfare provision, maintenance of distinctive national cultures, and a commitment to multilateralism—is increasingly recognized as a more attractive political model than that of the US.
For all these reasons, it is important to understand why the EU became what it is, and how it functions today.
The Choice for Europeas Revisionism
It is tempting, not just for scholars but for normal citizens as well, to think that such an extraordinary organization must have extraordinary causes—that is, the EU must have causes qualitativelydifferent from those that prevail in “normal” places and times. The EU must be unique, perhaps stemming from some singular form of European cultural idealism, historical shock, or geopolitical compulsion that transcends narrow national interest. Without this extreme compulsion, such an institution would never remain stable over time. Europeans must be culturally or historically different from the rest of the world, aspiring to a “superstate”in a way that makes their experience unimaginable and irrelevant to other countries—countries that still pursue, first and foremost, their narrow “national interest”. Traditional theories of international politics, which tend to stress rational behavior on the basis of national interest,it would seem to follow, cannot help us understand European integration.
This is indeed precisely what most scholars and most European activists—and most national politicians giving speeches at “Europe Day” celebrations—have said about the EU for the last half century. Most stress its idealistic and geopolitical origins. Some argue that what distinguishes Europeis, above all, its idealistic commitment to federalism. The goal is political union, the superstate, the “United States of Europe.” Traditional histories of European integration are thus recounted as battles between grand geopolitical visions. The 1960s, so it goes, pitted “intergovernmentalists” against “federalists”, or “Atlanticists” against “Gaullists.” In our times, in US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s unfortunate phrase, one speaks of “Old Europeans” against “New Europeans.”Othersmaintain that European integration has really been motivated by geopolitical shocks: the desire to prevent yet another war between Germany and France after the debacles of 1871, 1918 and 1945, or perhaps the overriding post-World War II realist imperative to balance the Soviet Union. The two views, idealistic and geopolitical, are in fact closely connected, because much of what made Europe attractive to many postwar idealists was the combined promise of ending war and opposing totalitarianism of the left (and right). Both strands of the traditional historical consensus, idealist and geopolitical,hold that economic integration was simply an incidental means chosen to achieve political ends, not an end in itself.
The Choice for Europe breaks with this tradition of historical interpretation. Issue-specific national interest, it argues, not idealism or geopolitical compulsion, is the motive force of integration. The EUis no theoretical exception. It is not a tool designed to achieve some greater ideological or geopolitical goal. It is an end in itself. Like nearly every other successful international organization in modern times, the EU is designed to manage globalization through mutually beneficial interstate policy coordination. If cooperation within the EU is more developed and advanced than under other institutions, it is because the member states of the EU are far more interdependent than countries elsewhere, and because this intense globalization gives their members a stronger national interest in cooperation.Thus the same theoretical concepts and theories—national interest, rational behavior, policy interdependence, interstate bargaining, international regime theory—that have been successfully employed to explain the emergence and form of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, or North Atlantic Free Trade Area can be used to explain the evolution of the EU.
As a work of history, the Choice for Europe seeks to provide detailed evidence to show that this is true—paralleling efforts by historians like Alan Milward and policy analysts like Giandomenico Majone.It does so by examining the causes of the “grand bargains” that have powered EU integration, from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Maastricht. Since most (though not all) of the specific policies adopted by the EU over the past half century have been economic, it follows—on this issue-specific interpretation—that most of the causes have been economic as well. European countries could not develop economically without aligning their policies with global trends, just as China and other East Asian countries cannot develop without doing so today.
The Choice for Europe structures an analysis of the EU’s history accordingly, arguing that the basic source of European integration lies in a series of common economic challenges that faced the European continent over the past half century. In each case governments sought multilateral responses to economic challenges when unilateral and bilateral policies failed. The first shock was an exogenous shift in the 1950s and 1960s in European trade from North-South trade (with colonial possessions and overseas dependencies) to North-North industrial (intra-industry) trade (with other developed countries, mostly in Europe). Governments accommodated this shift with the liberalization of trade after unilateral and bilateral actions failed.The second shock was the dissolution of the Bretton Woods system and rapid increases in capital mobility during the early 1970s, which placed pressure on European exchange rates. Unilateral policy failures ushered in efforts at monetary coordination under the European Monetary System (EMS). The third was a further increase in cross-border investment in the 1980s, combined with a crisis in domestic industrial policies, which ushered in the “single market” initiative—again after striking unilateral policy failures. The fourth shock was further increases in capital mobility and tensions within the EMS, which led to the Maastricht treaty of 2001 establishing a process leading to monetary union and a single currency. A final shock, not treated in the book because it post-dates it, was the collapse of the Berlin Wall, to which Europe responded with enlargement. In each case, governments can not reverse these processes of globalization, but can only choose whether and how to accommodate them. The shiftshave been exogenous, occurring for technological and economic reasons largely independent of European integration.
International economic trends, in other words, are causes, not consequences, of political commitments to European integration. A few examples illustrate the point. Consider Britain: The direction of British exportsshifted from nearly 2/3 to its Commonwealth to nearly ½ with Europe—before it joined the European Community in 1973. This convinced British policy-makers that they had no alternative but to join Europe, whatever their geopolitical or ideological beliefs (which were often quite skeptical).Or consider France: No one had stronger ideological reasons to oppose centralized international institutions than France’s President de Gaulle, a former general and conservative nationalist. When he entered office in 1958, most observers expected him to withdraw from the nascent European Community. Yet he embraced it, supporting mandatory tariff reductions, a common external tariff and trade policy, a common agricultural policy, and the exclusion of Britain—all, so the documents reveal, largely in order to secure French commercial interests. Most important to him were the interests of French farmers, whose votes kept him in office and whose commodity exports to Germany (later Britain) expanded at the expense of US and other third-country farmers (and saddling the global trading system with controversy ever since). And so it was when François Mitterrand, the ardent French socialist, embraced European liberalization, when Margaret Thatcher, the ardent British nationalist, accepted centralized enforcement of single market rules, or whenHelmut Schmidt, a committed (if chastened) Atlanticist, embraced European monetary cooperation. In each case, national economic interest, so the evidence in Choice for Europe seeks to show, trumped ideology or geopolitics.
Indeed, over the past 50 years, the EU has tended on balance to be, in Philippe Schmitter’s words,a “consumer”, not a “producer” of national security.Security issues have tended to be resolved first, with economic integration proceeding thereafter. The creation and the subsequent expansion of the EU were made possible because Germany was divided, NATO was created and Germanyadmitted, the Saar was repatriated, and later the Greek, Spanish and Portuguese dictatorships collapsed, and even later Soviet communism collapsed. Once these geopolitical issues were resolved in “one-off” arrangements, waves of multilateral economic integration followed. To be sure, the promiseof future EU membership has recently been an important force promoting democracy, human rights, rule of law, and market reforms in Southern and Eastern Europe, but this process took place before EU membership was completed. Once they have become members—as the recent cases of Austria, Poland and Cyprus demonstrate—member states have proven remarkably resistant to EU pressure.
Though most critical attention has been focused on Choice for Europe’s claim that the basic motives for European integration were economic interest rather than geopolitical or idealistic concerns, the book advancestwo other, equally important central arguments. The first is that governments reach deals by bargaining among each other according to their relative power. But, despite the phrase “power”, this argument is not “realist.” The concept of power employed here is distinctively liberal, that is, power stems from “asymmetrical interdependence”—governments that benefit most from a bargain will give up the most to get it. This view is contrasted to the classic “neo-functionalist” view that EU bargaining is dominated by famous “federalist” supranational entrepreneurs like Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors—a view for which there is, at best, sporadic evidence. The second argument is that governments delegate or pool prerogatives in institutions when it “locks in” a credible commitment to a set of linked, mutually beneficial but uncertain future bargains. This is, of course, the classic “institutionalist” or “regime theoretical” explanation for delegation to multilateral institutions, based on transaction-cost economics. Though the commitments examined in the book are international, in fact subsequent research has shown that the most important commitments have not been international, but domestic. That is, it is not the European Court of Justice or regulators in Brussels, but national courts and administrators following domestic law, who really enforce EU rules. Overall, the central theoretical argument of Choice for Europe—often referred to as the “liberal intergovernmentalist” theory—is that the evolution of European integration is best explained by a specific sequence of three factors: (a) issue-specific interdependence explains national preferences; (b) bargaining power based on asymmetrical interdependence explains bargaining outcomes; and (c) credible commitment to future linkages explainsthe pooling and delegation of sovereignty.
Generalizing the Argument to Asia
One question that critics of Choice for Europe have not asked, for the most part, is whether the argument is generalizable to other regions of the world. This was a major research question for the 1960s generation of integration theorists, but there has been less sustained research on the issue today. SinceChoice for Europe deliberately sets out to employ general theories of comparative politics and international relations to Europe, however, the analysis is potentially relevant to the experience of other regions. The successive enlargements of the EU from the original six members to nine, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty-five and recently twenty-seven members—and the power the EU has had to mobilize domestic political coalitions in those countries—further demonstrates its considerable multi-cultural appeal. The EU currently reaches from Malta, just off the African coast, to Sweden at the Arctic Circle, and from Portugal to the three Baltic states within the former Soviet Union. Enlargement is currently continuing down the Balkans, including several predominantly Moslem countries, and negotiations are proceeding with Moslem Turkey. Despite fears to the contrary, there is no evidence that the EU has grown less efficient or less cohesive as a result of this process.